“Westworld” S3 May Not Air Until 2020
Just a few days out from the second season premiere of HBO’s sci-fi western “Westworld” and talk is already turning towards the third season and when we might see it.
Following a pattern proving more common these days with highly buzzed about shows such as “Stranger Things” and “Game of Thrones,” there was a gap of eighteen months between the first season of “Westworld” (premiering October 2016) and the second (premiering April 2018).
Now it looks like the same will happen again for the third season as co-showrunner Jonathan Nolan spoke with
EW and alludes that the length of the gap is in discussion now as he and fellow showrunner Lisa Joy reportedly want a longer time for development and production between seasons. That means it could go beyond eighteen months and push S3’s airdate from late 2019 to early 2020:
“It’s an ongoing conversation with our friends at HBO, and for us, with a show of this scope and scale, we’re not interested in doing the compromised version. We want the show to get bigger and bigger and more ambitious and this takes time. We want to take all the time we need to get it right.”
Nolan also won’t say how long he thinks the show can run but does acknowledge they have a definitive end in mind and that each season is designed in a way to be partly self-contained:
“When we wrote the pilot we thought we’d get a bit further [into the story during season 1] than we did. The shape of the season emerges as you get down to writing. We want to feel like the show is rocketing ahead, and want to be fearless. We have an idea about how this breaks down but it’s not so much the number of seasons but the ambition of the story we’re telling.
To that end, we don’t like to endlessly build mystery. We like to settle our debts by the end of the season. We view each season as a self-contained chapter and the questions [raised at the start of each season] are largely answered by the end of each season. We want each season to feel satisfying the way a film franchise feels satisfying with each film. We want you excited to come back after 18 months but that you haven’t been left hanging on the edge of a cliffhanger – that doesn’t really feel fair to the audience.”
Lisa Joy meanwhile spoke with the outlet and cleared up one lingering mystery – yes the hosts take a dump:
“The hosts are basically organic. It’s cheaper that way to print them out. They eat, they sleep, they have sex, they can poop. It’s really like a human body with the one difference being where we have a brain, they have a CPU.”
“Westworld” returns to screens on April 22nd with ten new episodes running weekly.